Auchenstroan Coloured Ryelands

This week I thought I’d better do something about our veggie patch.  Although still productive, it’s been looking a bit rough lately with weeds finally having won the battle despite my best efforts at keeping them at bay. Truth be told I actually did very minimal weeding over the summer.  The wool I’d laid down […]

Our sheep tend to spend much of the winter close to the hay feeders. While the fields remain open, the comfort of the shed and close proximity of food is too much of a draw. Main deliveries of hay are stored in a large shed, but we keep a few bales near the feeders to […]

Every week, (weather depending) I arm myself with my ‘sheep bits and bobs kit’ and set off for a morning of hoof and bottom trimming.   In other words, I gather in a small number of sheep and spend a lovely morning with our teddy bears doing their health checks.  This includes checking and trimming their […]

Shearing is a big day in the sheep calendar and it can be pretty stressful for everyone involved, the sheep, the shearers and the farmers.  We start thinking about shearing at the beginning of May when the weather warms up and the sheep start feeling hot and itchy in their woolly coats. Every spring I […]

Round about the beginning of May I started my annual “sheep shed muck-out”.   I needed to get it spick and span for shearing in June.  The sheep love their shed and spend a lot of time in it during the winter so it can get pretty mucky.  They would spend a lot of time in […]

It’s been about six weeks since my last blog entry about the wonders of alfalfa and sugar-beet for elderly sheep. This winter just gone, we’ve been keeping a special eye on three of our more elderly flock members; Sparkle and Scarlett and Shelby.  Sparkle and Scarlett are missing some front teeth, and Shelby has arthritis […]

A few years ago we made the decision to stop lambing.  Much as we loved having lambs skipping about each spring and doing zoomies around the paddock, we came to the realisation that it just wasn’t financially viable for us.  We do miss it from time to time though, lambing with all its highs and […]

As well as the ‘daily hay ceremony‘ which I wrote about a couple of months ago, I thought I would write a few words about another little ceremony which the sheep really enjoy; the daily ‘nut ceremony’. Sheep go absolutely bonkers for their nuts.  I should add, these are not actual nuts, ‘sheep nuts’ are […]

Belinda Bibble-Bott (Belinda for short) is one of our big, friendly Orpington hens who came to us as eggs back in the spring of 2022.  We’ve seen Belinda and her siblings grow from tiny chicks the size of daisies into enormous hens almost twice the size and weight of our resident flock. Last spring the […]

  From the end of October through to the beginning of April (give or take), we move the little darlings onto hay.  During the winter, the grass pretty much stops growing and what grass there is isn’t very tasty or nutritious.  While many sheep are thrifty and do fine in the leaner winter months, ours […]

Back in the summer we decided it would be nice to plant some more apple trees.  Over the last few years we’ve been gradually expanding our orchard.  There were already about ten apple trees here when we moved here six years ago.  Last winter we added some more, and this year we ordered another ten.  […]

You can tell a lot about the health of an animal by what comes out the back end.  One of our woolly teddy bears, Witchy, has always produced dung more on the squishy side.  It sticks to the wool around her tail and is a magnet for flies.  During the summer we give her bottom […]